After the CPU and GPU, one of the biggest power draws on a laptop’s battery is the display, and with vibrant, power-sipping OLED displays still a ways off from mass adoption (and likely to be expensive for the next few years), there’s not a lot of options to make displays both cheaper and more power-efficient.

In fact, Pixel Qi and their low-power displays are pretty much our best bet for more daintily battery-suckling notebook panels anytime soon. Pixel Qi is a spin-off company fronted by Mary Lou Jepsen, formerly of the OLPC product. The idea is fairly simple: Pixel Qi are looking to make a line of vibrant color displays that can be easily switched into an e-paper like mode for optimum power savings.

It’s a great idea: imagine your Asus EeePC netbook running a Pixel Qi display. If you’re just typing email, reading text-heavy web pages or writing a report, you can eke out orders of magnitude more battery life simply by switching into e-paper mode. The technology could potentially increase battery capacities on these devices by 50%.

It now looks like Pixel Qi is close to completion. Jensen is claiming that the Pixel Qi 3Qi display will soon begin mass production, and there’s strong demand from multiple higher volume customers. We don’t know who, exactly, is interested, but if I had to make a bet, I’d guess Asus… this kind of technology is exactly the sort of thing it’s easy to imagine coming in a future Eee PC.